


let's get lost

by patrokla



Category: The Libertines
Genre: Depression, Escapism, M/M, carl watches old youtube videos by himself and is sad, that's it basically
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-04-03
Updated: 2016-04-03
Packaged: 2018-05-31 01:44:05
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 679
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6450391
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/patrokla/pseuds/patrokla
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>He watches Peter roll around on stage with his no-longer-new band, his only band, the low quality video just sharp enough to make Carl feel even worse. It’s a bit like cutting himself up, watching these videos. That’s probably why he’s doing it.</p>
            </blockquote>





	let's get lost

**Author's Note:**

> I wrote this the other night after remembering Carl mentioning how he watches old libs youtube videos in his memoir. Set in some sort of nebulous 2008/9. The title is from the Elliott Smith song of the same name.
> 
> Warnings: implied self-harm, lots of sadness.

He cuts a lonely figure, Peter, on almost every occasion. Even with his arms wrapped ‘round someone, or in the very midst of a crowd, there’s some sort of invisible, tangible space around him. He doesn’t project it consciously, no, hasn’t worked at creating that gap that separates him from everyone else. It’s just a side effect of having gone so far away in his own mind so often as a child; he’s always got at least one foot over the border of some distant country, and it shows.  
  
That’s what Carl thinks, anyway. It’s a theory he’s come up with in the last few hours, whilst trawling through Youtube, wading up to his neck in bitter regret and hazy memories courtesy of the thousands of people who seem to have gotten their hands on every bit of footage of him and Peter, together and apart, from the last decade.  
  
He’s ‘in between projects’ at the moment, Carl is. That’s the press term for a musician who’s either run out of workable ideas or fucked up all the ones he was working on. He's managed to do both, it feels like, Dirty Pretty Things having shuddered and spat its way to some sort of an end, and his head and notebooks filled with nothing but incoherent snatches of melody and words.  
  
Ironically, Peter’s apparently on some sort of campaign to resurrect his image, wearing good suits and releasing an album and a lot of other things Carl doesn’t like thinking of, because it all makes him childishly jealous, and too aware of how empty his own life is at the moment.  
  
He watches Peter roll around on stage with his no-longer-new band, his _only_ band, the low quality video just sharp enough to make Carl feel even worse. It’s a bit like cutting himself up, watching these videos. That’s probably why he’s doing it.  
  
There are times when Carl wonders if it’s really worth it, having the shreds of his sanity and dignity to himself, in return for booting Peter out of the band. He knows that part of this is the nostalgia kick he’s on, that the bad times were very bad, and increasingly lengthy, by the end, but - there were the good times. The video playing now, of the two of them in some anonymous pub trading smiles, drinks, and oh so subtle nipping kisses, it encompasses most everything that Carl misses about them. That easy companionship, that deep understanding of each other, the shared lens through which they viewed the world for a few short years…it’s the opposite of what Carl has now, which is nothing, and the closest to an ideal that he can think of any more.  
  
He’s tempted to find his mobile and call Peter, assuming the number he has is still any good. Ask him - what? To come see him? To reform the band? What the fuck could Carl say? What does he want from Peter that he can actually, realistically get?  
  
Carl curls further under his blankets, tilting the laptop someone had left in his flat so he can keep his eyes on himself, smothering a laugh in Peter’s neck as he tries to work out the chords for a song probably no one but he and Carl have heard.  
  
He thinks that this is an event horizon of pathetic, even for him, wrapped round himself and a laptop in an otherwise empty bed, in the middle of the night, watching his old…Peter…and feeling loveless. He feels like a teenager again, except less high. There’s whiskey somewhere in the flat, he could probably find it if he wanted to but - he doesn’t.  
  
Instead, he burrows deeper into his bed, and clicks on another video. He can’t call Peter, he can’t literally go back in the past and relieve those sordid memories, and he really doesn’t feel like he can get out of bed. It’s almost certainly pathetic, what he’s doing, but getting lost in these videos isn’t the worst escape he’s attempted - just one of the sadder ones.


End file.
